Today, Las Vegas bills itself as the “Entertainment Capital of the World,” drawing over 40 million visitors each year.
That global reputation was not achieved overnight. It evolved over a tumultuous century, as a dusty frontier town transformed into a glittering playground of casinos, glamour, and spectacle.
This historical narrative follows Las Vegas from its humble origins through the eras of mobsters and megaresorts, revealing how it earned its iconic status.
Las Vegas has always been a city of spectacle, but it’s also a place of constant change.
In this collection, we go beyond the clichés to explore Las Vegas in full. You’ll find guides for first-time visitors, deep dives into its history and economy, cultural perspectives on its identity, and personal stories that bring the city’s energy to life.
Early Settlement and the Legalization of Gambling in Nevada
Las Vegas began as an unlikely oasis in the Mojave Desert. The area’s natural springs attracted Indigenous Paiute people for centuries, and in 1829 Spanish explorers named it “Las Vegas,” meaning “the meadows,” for its green valley.
The modern city was born on May 15, 1905, when the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad auctioned off 110 acres of land, establishing Las Vegas as a small railroad stop between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.
Growth was modest at first, but the presence of water and the new rail connection drew a few settlers and businesses to this remote outpost.
A pivotal turning point came in the early 1930s. In 1931, construction began on the massive Hoover Dam project on the Colorado River, just 30 miles from Las Vegas.
Thousands of workers flooded into southern Nevada seeking jobs on what was then one of the largest engineering undertakings in U.S. history. Las Vegas swelled from a town of 5,000 to over 25,000 residents by the time the dam (originally called Boulder Dam) was completed in 1935.
Amid the Great Depression, this influx of workers and their families provided an economic lifeline for the struggling town. Most of the new arrivals were young men far from home, eager for diversion in their off hours.
Saloons, boarding houses, and makeshift casinos sprang up to entertain the dam crews, even though gambling was technically outlawed statewide at that time.
Facing the reality that gambling was already thriving underground — and desperate to keep money flowing during the Depression — Nevada acted to legitimize the vice.
In March 1931, the state legislature legalized casino gambling, reversing a 1910 ban. This decision proved to be “a turning point in Las Vegas history,” positioning the city to begin its rise as a gambling center. Almost immediately, entrepreneurs opened licensed casinos along downtown’s Fremont Street.
The first gambling license was issued to the Northern Club on Fremont in 1931 , and other establishments like the Las Vegas Club and Hotel Apache quickly followed. With Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric power lighting up Fremont Street’s emerging neon signs, downtown earned the nickname “Glitter Gulch” for its brilliant glow of marquees.
During these early 1930s days, Las Vegas became a wild boomtown of booze, betting, and quick divorces (Nevada also liberalized divorce laws in 1931), building the foundation for its future identity.
The Mafia Era and the First Big Casinos
By the 1940s, Las Vegas was on the cusp of a glamorous — if notorious — new era. The completion of Hoover Dam meant many construction workers moved on, but World War II soon brought another boost.
In 1941, the Las Vegas Army Air Field (now Nellis Air Force Base) opened, and the city hosted military trainees and airmen. More famously, 1941 also saw the first resort on what would become the Las Vegas Strip: the El Rancho Vegas hotel-casino opened on Highway 91 just outside city limits.
Its western-themed charm (including luxury amenities like air conditioning and a swimming pool) set the template for future Strip resorts. Other early Strip properties like the Hotel Last Frontier (opened 1942) soon followed , but it was after WWII that the real action began.
In the postwar 1940s, organized crime figures from America’s big cities set their sights on Las Vegas. Mobsters who had thrived during Prohibition saw gold in the desert: legally regulated casinos where they could both profit and launder money.
The most legendary of these was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, a dapper New York gangster with Hollywood connections. Backed by East Coast mob funding, Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel in late 1946 – an elegant resort on the highway south of town, far grander than any before it.
The Flamingo boasted luxurious rooms, a swanky showroom, and imported high-rollers from Los Angeles. Though Siegel’s life was cut short in 1947, his Flamingo established the Las Vegas Strip as the new epicenter of gaming glamour.
In subsequent years, more mob-funded casinos blossomed: the Sahara, Sands, Desert Inn, Riviera, Tropicana and others opened in the 1950s, often financed via secretive Teamsters Union loans and underworld money. Crime bosses like Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and their associates quietly took partnerships in Vegas clubs, even as front men publicly ran the businesses.
Under this growing constellation of neon lights, Las Vegas’s reputation as America’s “playground” began to take hold. By 1954, over 8 million tourists were visiting annually – an astonishing boom for a city that barely counted 24,000 residents in 1950.
They came not only to gamble, but also to see the stars. The 1950s ushered in Vegas’s first golden age of entertainment: intimate showrooms featured performances by the biggest names in show business, from Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to Liberace and Judy Garland.
The famed “Rat Pack” – Sinatra, Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop – became synonymous with Las Vegas nightlife, holding court at the Sands Hotel’s Copa Room in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Night after night, they wowed audiences with their swaggering, whiskey-fueled acts, and then gambled and caroused until dawn.
Their presence gave the city an aura of cool sophistication. As one account notes, the Rat Pack’s performances “helped to cement Las Vegas’ reputation as the entertainment capital of the world.”
Las Vegas in the 1950s was a paradoxical mix of glitz and grit. Alongside the elegant supper clubs were tawdry elements that earned the city another nickname: “Sin City.” Legalized gambling was joined by readily available illicit vices; Fremont Street’s Block 16 red-light district, though officially shut down during the war, had given Las Vegas a lingering notoriety for prostitution.
And while tourists saw glamorous showgirls on stage, behind the scenes the city remained segregated: black entertainers like Sammy Davis Jr. could perform on the Strip but often couldn’t stay as guests at the very hotels where they headlined. (Pressure from stars like Sinatra eventually forced Strip hotels to integrate by the early ’60s.) During these boom years, federal authorities also began scrutinizing the mob’s grip on Vegas.
Senator Estes Kefauver’s televised hearings on organized crime visited Las Vegas in 1950, exposing the extent of underworld influence in local casinos. Still, throughout the 1950s, free-spending tourists and Hollywood celebrities kept pouring into town, and the casinos kept the cash – much of it undeclared – flowing to their hidden mafia backers.
Las Vegas had cemented itself as a singular American playground: a city of neon, nightlife, and nonstop action, “synonymous with… big-name entertainment,” gambling and intrigue.
From Mobsters to Corporate Resorts
As the 1960s dawned, the mob’s heyday in Las Vegas was approaching its twilight. The federal government intensified its crackdowns on organized crime, and the casino skim (the mafia’s siphoning of untaxed gambling profits) drew law enforcement heat.
At the same time, legitimate businesses and investors started seeing opportunity in Vegas’s success. The most seismic change arrived in 1966 in the form of an eccentric billionaire: Howard Hughes. The reclusive aviator-industrialist came to Las Vegas that year and checked into the Desert Inn hotel – then refused to leave.
Instead, Hughes decided to buy the entire resort. Thus began a buying spree in which Hughes spent an estimated $300 million to acquire landmark casinos including the Desert Inn, Sands, Frontier, Silver Slipper, and Castaways. For Las Vegas, Hughes’ arrival was transformative.
Here was above-board money (he was one of America’s wealthiest men) muscling aside secretive crime bosses. Hughes operated through corporate entities and demanded strict accounting, helping push the mafia into the shadows.
He and other new investors painted gambling as “gaming” – a respectable entertainment business – rather than a criminal racket. Under Hughes’s influence, Vegas’s image slowly shifted away from its Wild West outlaw roots toward a more polished, cosmopolitan sheen.
By the 1970s, Nevada authorities also worked to clean up gambling’s reputation. Regulatory bodies like the Nevada Gaming Commission and Gaming Control Board, established in the late ’50s, enforced stricter licensing and drove out many unsavory elements.
Well-funded hotel corporations and investors took over many Strip properties. Eccentric personalities still abounded – from reformed bootlegger Moe Dalitz, who ran the Stardust, to Kerk Kerkorian, a Los Angeles businessman who built the record-setting 1,500-room International Hotel in 1969 – but they increasingly operated in the daylight of corporate finance.
The International (later known as the Las Vegas Hilton) brought legitimate show business power to town by signing Elvis Presley to an exclusive residency in 1969. Elvis’s Las Vegas run lasted through the mid-1970s, drawing millions of fans and proving that Las Vegas could be as much about superstar entertainment as gambling itself.
His hit song “Viva Las Vegas” had already become a local anthem, and now nightly crowds at the International witnessed Elvis usher in the era of the Vegas mega-concert.
The 1970s also saw Las Vegas weather some growing pains. The decade’s economic recessions and oil crises led to dips in tourism. Some of the older mob-linked casinos struggled or went bankrupt. Yet new corporate-owned resorts still rose: MGM Grand (opened 1973 by Kerkorian) was the world’s largest hotel at the time, and Hilton took over several properties.
By the end of the 1970s, the last major mob casino holdouts were facing indictments (the FBI’s famous “Operation Strawman” would later convict mob bosses skimming from the Stardust and Fremont casinos in the early ’80s). Las Vegas was shedding its gangster past.
One historian noted that as World War II-era casino owners aged out, “the ‘Mafia/Rat Pack’ Las Vegas of the mid-20th century came to a gradual end in the 1980s.”
In its place, a new kind of Vegas was emerging – one dominated not by shadowy figures in smoky back rooms, but by publicly traded companies and visionary entrepreneurs with grand ambitions.
The Rise of the Megaresorts (1980s–2000s)
Las Vegas roared back to life in the 1980s with a wave of extravagant new developments. A new generation of entrepreneurs – men like Steve Wynn, Sheldon Adelson, and Kirk Kerkorian (in a second act) – saw untapped potential in Vegas and had the capital to realize it.
Their idea was the “megaresort”: an all-in-one fantasy complex combining massive hotels, casinos, theaters, fine dining, shopping malls, and themed attractions. Gambling would remain central, but these resorts aimed to be complete entertainment destinations.
The first of the breed was The Mirage, opened in 1989 by Steve Wynn. It was an instant game-changer: a tropical-themed paradise fronted by an erupting volcano, with a lavish Cirque du Soleil show inside and an atrium full of palm trees.
The Mirage’s unprecedented scale and amenities proved so successful that it kicked off a building boom. During the 1990s, one after another, immense themed resorts rose along the Strip, each trying to outshine the last.
The Excalibur (a medieval castle), Luxor (a giant glass pyramid with a bright beam of light), MGM Grand (an Art Deco Hollywood homage, once again the world’s largest hotel), Treasure Island (with live pirate ship battles), New York-New York (a mini Manhattan skyline), Bellagio (an opulent Italianate palace with dancing fountains) – the list went on.
These fantastical properties reshaped the Las Vegas skyline into a kind of architectural theme park. Tourists could wander from ancient Egypt to medieval Europe to modern Manhattan in the space of a few blocks.
Amid this explosion, older icons fell to the wayside. Storied casinos like the Dunes, Sands, and Desert Inn were imploded to make room for modern behemoths. Corporate ownership became the norm; companies like MGM Grand, Mirage Resorts, and Caesars Entertainment amassed multiple properties.
By the year 2000, Las Vegas Boulevard was lined with billions of dollars worth of megaresorts, and visitation was surging again. The city’s population more than doubled in the 1990s, reflecting a boom in jobs from the new resorts.
Importantly, Las Vegas had also diversified its appeal beyond gambling, cementing its claim as the “Entertainment Capital.” The new megaresorts heavily promoted their entertainment offerings: lavish production shows, celebrity chef restaurants, high-end nightclubs, and family-friendly attractions.
In the 1990s, you could ride a roller coaster at the Stratosphere tower, watch white tigers in the Mirage, or take a gondola ride through a replica of Venice at The Venetian. The city also became a top convention destination, filling its gigantic hotel towers with business travelers during the week.
By the early 2000s, Las Vegas was hosting world-class boxing matches, NCAA basketball tournaments, and had even branded itself as a wedding capital (with hundreds of weddings per day fueling a chapel industry).
In 2003, pop superstar Celine Dion launched a long-term residency at Caesars Palace, pioneering a new era in which A-list musicians like Elton John, Britney Spears, and later Adele would regularly set up camp in Vegas theaters – further affirming that Las Vegas wasn’t just about casinos, but about entertainment in all forms.
By the turn of the millennium, the evolution was essentially complete: Las Vegas had fully reinvented itself as a world-class resort city. The mob was long gone, replaced by Fortune 500 gaming corporations. Family-oriented theme park experiments (like the short-lived MGM Grand Adventures) gave way to new ultra-luxury towers and adult-oriented marketing.
The cheeky ad slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” introduced in 2003, captured the city’s enduring promise of consequence-free indulgence. Glittering new additions like Wynn Las Vegas (2005), the Palazzo (2007), and the CityCenter complex (2009) continued to push architectural boundaries and upscale opulence.
Even as economic recessions came and went, Las Vegas proved remarkably adept at rebranding and rebounding – whether by embracing high-end dining in the 2000s, dayclub pool parties and EDM DJs in the 2010s, or professional sports in the 2020s (the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights and the NFL’s Raiders both now call Las Vegas home). Through it all, entertainment remained the city’s lifeblood.
Branding Las Vegas as the “Entertainment Capital of the World”
From the Rat Pack stage shows of the 1950s to today’s high-tech extravaganzas, Las Vegas has continually proclaimed itself the ultimate entertainment destination. As early as the mid-20th century, boosters were calling Vegas the “Entertainment Capital of the World” – a bold claim that grew more true with each passing decade.
The concentration of talent in Las Vegas was unmatched: by the 1960s and ’70s, a visitor could catch icons like Elvis, Sinatra, or Liberace on any given night. This tradition has carried into the modern era.
On any evening in contemporary Vegas, there are dozens of headline acts and productions to choose from – Grammy-winning singers in residence, Broadway-caliber musical productions, Cirque du Soleil’s acrobatic marvels, comedy headliners, magic illusionists, and beyond.
The city’s marketing embraced this abundance. The classic glittering skyline and the very name “Las Vegas” became synonymous not just with gambling, but with entertainment at its grandest scale.
Today, Las Vegas explicitly bills itself as the Entertainment Capital of the World, and by the numbers it’s hard to dispute. As of 2023, the city welcomes over 40 million visitors per year from across the globe.
They come for an ever-expanding array of experiences: not only slot machines and poker tables, but also arena concerts, championship sporting events, e-sports tournaments, fine art exhibitions, and celebrity chef cuisines. The Las Vegas Strip now ranks among the most visited tourist boulevards on Earth, outshining landmarks in many older cities.
In a sense, modern Las Vegas is the culmination of a century of reinvention. It took the vision of frontier risk-takers, the glitz provided by gangsters and stars, the business acumen of corporate developers, and the continual drive to top itself with something bigger and flashier.
The result is a city unlike any other – one that started as a desert railroad stop and became a global byword for spectacle and escape.
Conclusion
The rise of Las Vegas as the Entertainment Capital of the World is a story of bold gambles and constant reinvention.
From legalizing gambling in the gritty 1930s, to the mob-built casino palaces of the postwar era, to the themed megaresorts of recent decades, Las Vegas has never stopped evolving to capture the public’s imagination.
Its journey reflects larger-than-life characters and savvy strategy, all in service of creating a city where almost anything can be experienced – for the right price. As a result, Las Vegas today stands as a neon-lit monument to entertainment in all its forms, a place where the line between history and legend often blurs under the bright lights of the Strip.
The meadows of Nevada have truly become a world capital of entertainment, fulfilling the nickname the city proudly claims.